House of Spies (Gabriel Allon #17)(35)
Initially, Lavon conducted his probe from his office on the top floor. But once the hook had been set, he gathered up his files and migrated downward through the building, to the cramped subterranean chamber known as Room 456C. The rest of the old Barak team soon joined him. There was tall, balding Yossi Gavish, with his British-accented Hebrew and donnish air, and Rimona Stern, she of the sandstone-colored hair, childbearing hips, and acid tongue. Yaakov Rossman, the pockmarked former agent-runner who was now the chief of Special Ops, reclaimed his old spot at the communal table, next to the last chalkboard in all of King Saul Boulevard. Dina Sarid, the Office’s walking database of Palestinian and Islamic terrorism, seized her usual place in the far corner. On the blank wall above her desk she hung an enlargement of the last known photograph of Saladin, the surveillance shot taken in the Tri-Border Area of South America. The message to the others was unmistakable. Jean-Luc Martel and Olivia Watson were mere stepping-stones. The ultimate prize was Saladin.
Gabriel, with his aching back and ribs, required no such reminder. Occasionally, he poked his head in the door to check on the team’s progress, but for the most part he kept to the top floor and walked an administrative tightrope, a chief one minute, a field man and planner the next. Not since the days of Ari Shamron had a director general held the tiller of an operation so tightly. Even so, the rest of the Office’s daily business—the myriad of smaller ops, the recruitments in progress, the analysis and assessment of current threats—proceeded as normal, thanks to the presence of Uzi Navot just across the hall. This was the maiden voyage of their new partnership, and it went off without a hitch. Navot even accompanied Gabriel to a meeting with the prime minister, though unlike Gabriel he proved powerless to resist the kung pao chicken. “It’s the salt,” he confessed as they filed out of Kaplan Street. “I’d eat my shoe if it was fried in oil and coated with soy sauce.”
As Eli Lavon tunneled into the dubious hospitality conglomerate known as JLM Enterprises, Yossi Gavish and Rimona Stern focused their efforts on Jean-Luc Martel the man. The story of his humble beginnings had been told often. He did not hide from them; they were, like his mane of almost-black hair, part of his allure. As a child he had lived in a nothing village in the hills of Provence. It was the kind of place, he often recounted, through which the rich and beautiful passed on their way down to the sea. His father had laid tile, his mother had swept and mopped it. She was part Algerian, at least that was the rumor in the village. Jean-Luc’s father beat her often. He beat Jean-Luc, too. The father disappeared when Jean-Luc was seventeen. Some months later his body was discovered at the bottom of an isolated ravine, a few miles from the village. The skull was in ruins, blunt force trauma, probably a hammer. Inside French law enforcement, it was widely regarded as Jean-Luc Martel’s first murder.
In press interviews, Martel spoke often of the fact that he was a poor and disruptive student. University was not an option, so at eighteen he made his way to Marseilles, where he went to work waiting tables in a restaurant near the Old Port. He studied the business carefully—or so the story went—and scraped together enough money to open a restaurant of his own. In time, he opened a second, then a third. And thus an empire was born.
The five hundred pages of the French file, however, told a rather different version of Jean-Luc Martel’s time in Marseilles. It was true he worked for a brief time as a waiter, but the restaurant was no ordinary restaurant. It was a money-laundering operation run by Philippe Renard, a high-ranking figure in the French milieu who specialized in the importation and distribution of illegal narcotics. Renard took an instant liking to the handsome young man from the hills, especially after learning that Jean-Luc had killed his own father. Renard taught his young apprentice everything there was to know about the business. He introduced him to suppliers in North Africa and Turkey. He counseled him on how to manage rivalries with other gangs so as to avoid needless bloodshed and publicity. And he instructed him on how to use seemingly legitimate businesses to launder and conceal profits. Martel rewarded Renard’s trust by killing him the same way he killed his father, with a hammer, and seizing control of his business.
Overnight, Jean-Luc Martel became one of the most important drug figures in France. But he was not content to remain just one among many; total domination of the trade was his goal. And so he built an army of streetwise killers, mainly Moroccans and Algerians, and unleashed them on his rivals. When the blood finally stopped flowing, Martel was the only one standing. His expansion in the drug trade coincided with his rise in the legitimate world. Each side of the business fueled the other. JLM Enterprises was a criminal undertaking from top to bottom, a giant front-loading washing machine that produced hundreds of millions of clean euros each year.
He was married once, briefly, to a beautiful actress who played small parts in forgettable films. During the divorce proceedings, she threatened to tell the police everything she knew about the true source of her husband’s income. An overdose of sleeping pills and alcohol was her fate. Afterward, he abstained from public romance for many months, which the press found endearing. The police weren’t as impressed. Quietly, they tried to link Martel to his wife’s death. The investigation turned up nothing.
When finally he emerged from his Blue Period, it was with Olivia Watson on his arm. She was thirty-three at the time, a member of that lost tribe of English expatriates who stumble into Provence and never seem to find their way home again. Too old for modeling, she was managing a small art gallery that sold minor works—“And that,” explained Rimona Stern, “is being charitable”—to the tourists who besieged the village each summer. With Martel’s financial help, she opened a gallery of her own. She also designed a line of beachwear and a collection of Proven?al-style furnishings. Like the gallery, both bore her name.